The New York Times on Tuesday reported that things like opposition to property taxes and opposing U.S. membership in the United Nations are issues that are “dear to the far right,” even though surveys show that these positions are shared much more broadly.
The Times article, by Michael Wines and Lizette Alvarez, explored a Southern white supremacy group’s ties to the Republican Party, and was written after last week’s church shooting in Charleston, S.C. It described the Council of Conservative Citizens as having “a long history of promoting white primacy” that was shared by white 21-year-old Dylann Roof, the suspect in the shooting.
“[T]he group…endorses causes dear to the far right for decades, including abandoning membership in the United Nations, maintaining the United States as a ‘Christian country,’ denouncing homosexuality and opposing sex education, multiculturalism and property taxes,” said the Times article.
But some of those positions are more widely believed among the public than the Times indicated, regardless of ideology.
Property taxes have been named in two separate surveys as the worst kind of tax. In a 2005 Gallup poll, 35 percent of American adults, a plurality, named the local property tax as “the least fair” compared to other taxes, including the federal income tax. A 2003 NPR/Harvard University/Kaiser Family Foundation poll asked American adults to name the tax they disliked the most, and the property tax was cited more frequently than any other tax.
On religion, the United States is not, legally speaking, a “Christian country,” but a First Amendment Center survey in 2013 found that 51 percent of the public thinks (erroneously) that the Constitution established it to be one. That includes 49 percent of self-described “moderates.” In 2007, the First Amendment Center found that half of the American public believed public school teachers should be allowed to use the Bible as a factual text.
There is scant credible information available on public opinion about whether the U.S. should “abandon” the United Nations. A 2013 Pew Research poll, however, showed that 31 percent of American adults had an unfavorable view of the international body. Among independents, 60 percent said they had a favorable view, leaving 40 percent who did not.
“One need not monopolize a cause to hold it dear,” said Michael Wines in an email to the Washington Examiner media desk, by way of explaining the assertion in his article that these positions are “dear to the far right.” He said, “Nothing in the article implies that the far right has a monopoly on this particular point of view [that the U.S. should remain a ‘Christian nation’].
Regarding the U.N., Wine said that “pretty much everyone gets fed up” with the institution at some point, but that he would “suggest that ardor for walking away from it altogether rises as one moves rightward on the ideological spectrum.”
Wines also denied that the article was meant to imply that the aforementioned political views are in any way unique to a group that is both racist and supports some conservative positions.
“You can agree or disagree with the [Council of Conservative Citizens’] stance on race,” he said, “but however repugnant that stance may be, it does not reflect on whatever other principles the group embraces.”
Wines noted, for example, that the Council of Conservative Citizens have listed on their website “Protection of the Environment and Natural Heritage” as one of the group’s principles. “I don’t believe for a moment that that makes all environmentalists racists,” he said.
